Vocation : Travel : Adventurer

Børge_Ousland

Børge Ousland (born 31 May 1962) is a Norwegian polar explorer. He was the first person to cross Antarctica solo.He started his career as a Norwegian Navy Special Forces Officer with Marinejegerkommandoen, and he also spent several years working as a deep sea diver for the oil industry in the North Sea.
On 4 May 1990 Ousland and Erling Kagge became the first explorers ever to reach the North Pole unsupported, after a 58-day ski trek from Ellesmere Island in Canada, a distance of 800 km.In 1994, he made the first solo and unsupported journey to the North Pole from Arctic Cape in Russia.Between 15 November 1996 and 17 January 1997, he became the first in the world to do an unsupported solo crossing of the Antarctic: 1,864 miles from the edge of the Ronne Ice Shelf to the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf. The ski journey was made with kite assistance, and also holds the record for the fastest unsupported journey to the South Pole, taking just 34 days.On 22 January 2006, together with Mike Horn he began a journey to the North Pole in full Arctic night, successfully concluded on 23 March.In September 2010, Ousland's team aboard the trimaran sailboat The Northern Passage completed the circumnavigation of the North Pole. A Russian team aboard the Peter I achieved the same feat in that season. These were the first recorded instances of the circumnavigation of the North Pole without an icebreaker.
In December 2011 he traversed Antarctica to the South Pole for the centennial celebration of the first expedition to reach the Pole.
Ousland married at the North Pole in 2012 having been flown in by helicopter with "20 or 30 people".

Patrick_Gabarrou

Patrick Gabarrou a.k.a. "Le Gab" (born 19 July 1951 in Évreux), is a French mountaineer and mountain guide who is credited with more than 300 first ascents, most of them in the Mont Blanc massif.
He has been the president of the international environmental NGO Mountain Wilderness from 2006 to 2010. He is mostly an ice climber, and is considered to be a pioneer of the modern wave of ice climbing.He also opened routes in several other regions like Canada, Bolivia and Patagonia.

Catherine_Destivelle

Catherine Destivelle (born 24 July 1960) is a French rock climber and mountaineer who is considered one of the greatest and most important female climbers in the history of the sport. She came to prominence in the mid-1980s for sport climbing by winning the first major female climbing competitions, and by being the first-ever female to redpoint a 7c+/8a sport climbing route with Fleur de Rocaille in 1985, and an 8a+ (5.13c) route with Choucas in 1988. During this period, she was considered the strongest female sport climber in the world along with Lynn Hill, however, in 1990 she retired to focus on alpine climbing.
In 1990, she made the first-ever female alpine ascent of the Bonatti Pillar on the Petit Dru, which she followed up in 1991, by becoming the first-ever female to create a new extreme alpine route, also on the Petit Dru, which was named Voie Destivelle in her honor. From 1992 to 1994, Destivelle became the first female to complete the winter alpine free solo of the "north face trilogy" of the Eiger, the Grandes Jorasses, and the Matterhorn. She made Himalayan and high-altitude ascents such as Nameless Tower in 1990, the southwest face of Shishapangma in 1995, and the south face of Peak 4111, in Antarctica, in 1996.
As well as her Alpine free solos, she made other notable free solos, such as the Devils Tower in 1992, and the Old Man of Hoy in 1997. She is the subject of several documentaries, including Rémy Tezier's, Beyond the Summits, which won the best feature-length film award at the 2009 Banff Film Festival. In 2007, she was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour, and in 2020, became the first-ever female recipient of the Piolet d'Or Lifetime Achievement Award.

Léo_Valentin

Léon Alfred Nicolas Valentin (22 March 1919, Épinal (Vosges), France - 21 May 1956, Liverpool, England) was a French adventurer, who attempted to achieve human flight using bird-like wings. Léo Valentin is widely considered to be the most famous "birdman" of all time. He was billed as "Valentin, the Most Daring Man in the World".

René_Desmaison

René Desmaison (April 14, 1930, in Bourdeilles, Dordogne – September 28, 2007) was a veteran French mountaineer, climber and alpinist.Desmaison had climbed more than 1,000 mountains since the 1950s. He made the first ascent of 114 previously unclimbed mountains throughout the Andes, Alps and Himalayas in his 40-year climbing career. He is also credited with creating several new winter routes in the Alps.René Desmaison died on September 28, 2007, at La Timone Hospital in Marseille, France. He was 77 years old.

Norbert_Casteret

Norbert Casteret (19 August 1897 – 20 July 1987) was a famous French caver, adventurer and writer, and is one of the most recognisable names in caving worldwide. Following Édouard-Alfred Martel (the "father of modern speleology", although Casteret sometimes also enjoys this title), Casteret, along with Robert de Joly, became a leading figure of French speleology between the world wars and into the middle of the 20th century.

Pierre_Savorgnan_de_Brazza

Pierre Paul François Camille Savorgnan de Brazza (born Pietro Paolo Savorgnan di Brazzà; 26 January 1852 – 14 September 1905) was an Italian-French explorer. With his family's financial help, he explored the Ogooué region of Central Africa, and later with the backing of the Société de Géographie de Paris, he reached far into the interior along the right bank of the Congo River. He has often been depicted as a man of friendly manner, great charm and peaceful approach towards the Africans he met and worked with on his journeys, but recent research has revealed that he in fact alternated this kind of approach with more calculated deceit and at times relentless armed violence towards local populations. Under French colonial rule, the capital of the Republic of the Congo was named Brazzaville after him and the name was retained by the post-colonial rulers, one of the few African nations to do so. (Other exceptions are Pretoria, South Africa, Port Louis, Mauritius, Libreville ,Gabon, and Victoria, Seychelles.)

Nicolas_Vanier

Nicolas Vanier (born 5 May 1962) is a French adventurer, writer and director.
His 2004 film The Last Trapper follows a trapper in Yukon, Canada.
His film, Loup ("Wolf") was released at the end of 2009 and was presented at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. Loup is about the life of the Evens tribe in North Eastern arctic Siberia, in the Verkhoïansk mountain range, who live by raising large herds of reindeer (caribou), which involves protecting them from attacks by wolves.
In 2018, France Nature Environnement formally complained that a film crew overseen by Vanier had disturbed a colony of Greater Flamingoes, by repeatedly flying over them in an ultra-light aircraft, causing many - an estimated 11% of the total breeding population in France - to desert their nests and eggs.